On Friday at I braved a capoeira class comprised only of the teacher and two other manly capoeiristas...and learned my body is capable of throwing a rabo de arraia, going into a headstand, and passing over into a backbend! I also got to practice berimbau for the first time, and some new pondeiro beats. (Thank you, axé of San Cristóbal!)
This was also the weekend of a cultural festival in San Cristóbal, featuring a wide range of music from around Mexico, with bands playing for free in the main plaza. I saw stunning Lila Downs on Sunday...who is like a sorceress on stage, with a mind-bloggling soprano, and so loved here half the crowd knew every word to her songs. Afterward, out to drinks with Gen, Ale, and co, I ordered what I expected to be a perfectly ordinary butter and brown sugar crepe...and am now, officially and forever, helplessly in love with the ambrosia that is southern México's unadulterated, brown and caramely cane sugar. I'll be bringing bricks home from market.
Over the weekend Gen educated me in altar building, bringing home bundles of marigolds and brainy-looking red flowers covered in fuzz, traditional copal (a sweet-smelling resin burnt like incense in little clay bowls), and offerings to feed the dead - favorite foods, cigarettes, pot and chocolate, pan dulce, café. She arranged it all on a bright table around photos or other reminders of her dead, candles scattered among them and a bed of pine needles underneath!
All around town, in restaurants and stores, flowers are used like paint to cover teired alters in eye-popping designs and crosses; maiz or stalks of flowers are braided into arches with blossoms and bananas; ribbons strung with tiny oranges (or some other unidentified fruit) hang over teirs of flickering candles, photos, and food. Every alter is different, covered in unique mementos and designs. And everywhere, the smell of pine needles and copal. Death is here, loud and clear. And, it's a party! It's a reunion! I'm struck by how healing the act of creativity can be - what an effective means of processing it is, especially within community. How wonderful to have ritualized a way to acknowledge greif, as a community, and alongside celebration.
...Kids here apparently get to celebrate about a five day stint of costumed merry-making, in some amalgamation of Día de los Muertos and Halloween traditions. They were out all weekend at odd hours with masks and candy baskets, which they press upon anyone, in restaurants or on the street - chiming, "Calabasita, tia!" If you give them candy or money, you're cool...if not, they chant, "Let the auntie die!"
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Over the weekend I developed a faint but persistent itch to move on, and woke up Monday morning determined to make it to Oaxaca for what was promised to be one of the most famous Días de los Muertos in México. Thank you Gen, and the capoeiristas and language teachers of San Cristóbal, for the relatively easeful time of transition I experienced there! Now I am glad to be at the true start of my solitary travels, with all the accompanying fresh fears, excitements, unpredictability, and things to learn...
A lovely woman from my bus asked about my instruments at the bus station (thank you, pondeiro), and we were shortly setting off together for a trek through town after lodging. Valentina spent a month in Oaxaca City and connected us quickly with a host family from her Spanish school, where they charged us less than a hostel for a room half a block from the cemetery and the carnival-like hubbub lining the road beside it.
Oaxaca is beautiful! The artesanal clothing, pottery, rugs, paintings are incredible and everywhere. The sun is warm here, and other things seem warmer, too...the colonial buildings of the centro are earthern pastels, pink rock laced in a rime of pale moss. The Zocalo is wonderfully green, tall trees (they look like banyans!) dispensing strained sunlight and fairy dust.
Valentina and I brave market (full of such different things than San Cris´s!!) and come back laden with fixings for our own alter. Dinner on the Zocalo dissolves into parades of brass bands and ridiculous costumes! The two costumes of choice appear to be miscellaneous members of gorry horror films, and the Méxicano version of a skeleton (MUCH more beautiful, bright embroidered clothing and eleborately painted faces like the pottery skulls you can buy around town right now), but there are also eerie fantastical creatures in HUGE masks (one that reminds me of the rabbit from Donnie Darko), skeletal brides, children in diablito masks or neon wigs.
We dance our way out of the mayham of the Zocalo and up the pedestrian street, which is peppered by people on display: posing in elaborate costumes for photos, enacting macabre skits, two little boys in a frozen tableau of horror - one stabbing the other. The street outside the Pantheon is full of vendors - food, flowers, candles and copal - with carnival games and rides at one end. Everything has the air of a family reunion. Things are happy and loud and calm at once. The fizz and the fireworks rooted in something heavy and warm, implicitly understood.
The Pantheon is full of little lights. Strands of guitar music and singing. We spiral slowly through a thousand dreams. The trees are wearing the yellow lace of lamp light on chlorophyll. The moon makes a scraping sound and swallows another layer of milk.
